With the recent influx of devices hitting the markets which do not come equipped with a SD card reader, the obvious next step (as per the manufacturers main purpose of omitting the SD card slots) is to invest in a cloud service option. Here are 8 best Cloud Storage services you need to know about.

DropBox:
Not overly expensive. Great for sharing files. Great for automatically backing up photos from phones and devices. Excellent client (desktop/mobile) software. Unknown track record with privacy (but you can encrypt your own data, if that’s an issue). I’ve used them for a few years now and after attempting to migrate away, I decided to stick with them. This is our #1 pick in terms of balancing price with convenience and quality. Our only concern with Dropbox (and this is probably true for almost every service) is you can’t create special accounts or API Keys to upload files from servers or other places you don’t want to leave your password laying around.

Amazon Cloud Drive:
Cheaper than Dropbox. If most of your data is photos, you can get a dirt cheap plan. Keep in mind that Dropbox uses Amazon for their own data storage. The client software sucks. You would only attempt to go with Amazon because it’s cheaper.

Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive:
Both seem pretty equal in terms of pricing/features. Google’s client software seems to be a little better, especially on non-Windows operating systems. Data-privacy is probably the same (although Google may fight the govt. a bit more than Microsoft, but that’s subjective). Microsoft just recently lowered the amount of free data they give away. We prefer Google’s email (Gmail) over Microsoft’s offerings. Overall, we’re really not sure why one would use either of these services over DropBox, especially now that Dropbox has released their own set of “productivity tools”.

OwnCloud
An open source project where you can either host your own dropbox-like system or pay a provider to do so. This is better if you like privacy. It would be great to use if you don’t mind maintaining it and have a box somewhere with a stable network connection to use. For the price of almost any vps/cloud-server-instance + disk space, you’re probably not going to beat Dropbox’s price. This seems like a cool option if all of those other things are already in place. In terms of convenience, we opted to stick with Dropbox. We have 0 experience with the client software, so no clue whether those are nice (or not).

S3:
Hypothetically, you could simply use Amazon’s (or really anyone’s “cloud” storage) to back your data up. It’s going to be just as secure as Dropbox, if not slightly more secure. (Security, almost strictly through obscurity — although S3 allows you to set access permissions). You can access the S3 through both a browser or use something like s3-fuse to mount a bucket as part of your file-system (Linux, maybe Mac). We believe there is an S3 File Browser thing for windows. This would probably be the cheapest option but would require the most work and not have a mobile client (Hey, there’s an idea for a project!)

Boxcryptor:
Would like to add it to the list to store important documents with sensitive information. That’ll keep anyone from seeing sensitive stuff if your computer or cloud account is compromised.

Google Photos:
For photos and videos if you’re ok having them downsized you can’t beat Google Photos. Even if you don’t want them downsized, would recommend Google Photos for the ease of organization and integration with other things. So long as you’re not creeped out by them having your photos and probably using them to improve their intelligence software.

hubriC:
HubriC from OVH, they are also accessible via an API and charge a flat rate (€50/year/10TB) however they do restrict speed (10/10) and their data-centre is in France which could be a deal breaker if you are US based.

What if I tell you that you can have it all? You can be a good designer (figuring out the problems and coming op with fitting solutions, communicating with your client etc.). If you’re really serious, I strongly suggest taking an online graphic/web design course from a university. Many will let you do this either for free, or for a fee but without having to apply for admission since you’re not taking a full degree program. Classes like this are really important to help you get the fundamentals of design, which are tough to get from just short online tutorials.

Dribbble : Social network/showcase for designers. Great for inspiration, so long as you don’t get caught up in the feedback loops there. Because of their exclusivity people perceive them as elitist but bear in mind that’s their attempt at quality control. They market themselves to people looking for the best of the best in the design field. There are lots of good things about dribble. Take their jobs section. You don’t have to be a member to look at that, and it connects you with some pretty serious players in the business. There are a lot of great designers who post on there, but there are way more who are students or junior level. There is zero correlation between having an account and being a good designer.
Much of the stuff getting posted on Dribbble is taken out of context of how you would actually see it in a working design.

Behance : . Behance along with actual work in the form of raw code and group stuff, could get you job offers with Microsoft, Adobe and Texas Instruments among other companies. In fields like graphic design with such a low entry barrier, We see enough terrible design on a daily basis. That being said, granted there are much more good designers than on a site like Behance rather than on Dribble.

A List Apart : Long-running web magazine discussing design, development, web standards and content strategies. There are few, if any, sources that are better when it comes to the subject of web design.

Designer News : A great aggregator of design links and discussions. This could be an almost daily read for you.

Jeffrey Zeldman : Founder of A List Apart and the guy that started the web standards movement on the mid 90’s. It is easily one of the most influential people in interactive design.

Colossal : Chicago-based design mag for the web. It is usually a great resource for some visual inspiration.

Medium: This Could Be Better : “Questionable design decisions, questioned.”

Code School : Code School will give you a path to follow, you can start with html/css, then javascript, then ruby/rails if you like that language.
Really you just need to start building a site. When you find you have hit a wall start searching for ways to solve that particular problem. No class is going to teach/prepare you for everything nor will they give you all of the possible ways to solve the problem.

DesignersList : A great way to learn design is to just mimic websites you like. If you can copy them, you’ll kinda learn their thought process along the way and hopefully pick up WHY they chose to do what they did in the design. Get photoshop and just learn as you go! Follow design blogs and immerse yourself into the world.

W3School : It is an invaluable resource for learning the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript so we would highly recommend that as a starting point.
Once you’ve got a feel for how the markup works, we would recommend avoiding frameworks until you really understand the language and general flow of a webapp. It’s a recipe for confusion otherwise since they all seek to abstract the details of the request/response cycle.

UpLabs : Copy what you love and eventually once you have seen and done a lot of things you’ll be able to develop your own style using established principles which have already proven to work. And always remember: A great interface design is not finished when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.

Edward Tufte : Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
There is an entire world of knowledge in this book. If you can’t see that, and lots of people can’t, consider a different career. If you can, you are on the right path and have a good chance at success.

Mackenzie Child : Search for Mackenzie Child on youtube. He’s currently doing one design per day to lead up to the release of a design course. Apart from that he also goes into the design process in the earlier videos of his Rails tutorials. He’s recently put them up for free on his Youtube as well.

Stack Exchange : If you’re speaking of technical, “how do I do this thing” type questions, then you should create an account over at StackExchange and ask away.
Always do your homework first, though. The sites are strictly moderated by their respective community, and poorly-worded or off-topic questions will be closed. Take the time to read the site description for each site and read some existing questions to figure out where your particular question makes most sense. If you put a bit of effort into learning the system you can get a lot out of Stack Exchange, but if you just run in and start asking poorly-researched questions you’ll quickly get frustrated.

Ink : As you get further along, you should check out Ink – http://ink.sapo.pt/
It is a mini framework on which you can easily build responsive interfaces.

Hackdesign : It gives you the core fundamentals of fonts and even some really cool snippets for responsive templates. http://hackdesign.org/

Designer Tool Box : http://designerstoolbox.com/ LOVE this site, it has various die lines for packaging and envelopes, has information on envelope enclosure sizes, loren ipsum generator and photoshop files of browser windows that are customizable.